Wikiparty

One of the interesting implications of Pink’s argument is that it helps to explain tech phenomena like peer production and open-source technology. Wikipedia seems like a colossally ambitious and staggeringly unlikely project, but Pink’s ideas go some way toward showing why it’s been so successful. In fact, others in the Internet world have made similar observations, particularly about the Sawyer Effect. Take Marissa Mayer, vice president of Google, quoted in the Times several years ago saying that online games

employ a technique called “human computation”&#8212harnessing the human brain to collectively perform tasks that digital computers have yet to master … It’s the same trick the fictional Tom Sawyer famously used to get his friends to whitewash a fence for him, only multiplied millions of times.

That sounds a tad manipulative, but others make it out as even less grand and more abusive. Here’s Ascribe Newswire taking a more sinister view of what they call “the Sawyer Principle:”